Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Turns out my occupation is one of 38 identified by an author where women make more than men. Mine is actually the occupation with the second largest pay gap (I'm a Statistician), where the median salary for a woman is 35% higher than the median salary for a man. The occupation with the largest gap, Sales Engineer.

As I look through these occupations I'm finding two distinct catagorizations I would make, without any actual data to back me up, so this is merely conjecture. I see jobs like, statistician, Aerospace engineers, financial Analysts, Tool and Die Makers. These jobs, not jobs one really expects to see a lot of women in. And then I see the reverse Library technicians, Library assistants, clerical, Telephone operators, jobs were one might expect to see a lot of women.

This makes sense, as we're looking at jobs where women make more money, so in jobs where women are rare, they might pay women higher salaries to attract them. (like mine, I make 10K more than the median male in my job, I don't know if that is awesome or disgusting, maybe the men are just mostly government employees ;-) )And in feilds with more women women may move up faster due to bias or their may just be more women at higher levels in the feild.

The information that I want to have about this chart is the percentage of men versus women in each group. And maybe even the mean salary for each gender, to see how it compares to the median. The median is probably a good idea in this instance, because the data is probably skewed. But at the same time it could be affected heavily by sample size. So I'd want to see more information about this analysis because I don't completely trust it given the agenda of the author.

On a more political and less analytical note, while part of me is glad that women are might be getting more recognition in some fields, another part of me is not glad that we are getting MORE recognition than men. The of the game is Equality, I don't want to make more than men (okay, I want to make more than everyone, but still) I want to be payed the same amount for the same job. We're hiring at my company for another one of me, and I sureif we hire a guy he'll get payed the exact same as I did starting, or whatever is fair considering his experience.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Google has become everyone's favorite tool. I would be lying if I said I wasn't enamored of google, gmail, google talk etc. Because I am.

And when google went to China and began it's censorship, supporting the regime there I tried to be optimistic, at least now the chinese have access to some information, if not all of it. And google might as well get into this market. I googled "Google Censorship" and I yahooed it too, I found some information about government related censorship, like the unavailablility of abu ghraib photos via the image search, or other sites that have been censored at government request. Fine, government, I get it.

But, I'd really really like to know the reasoning behind censoring a random blog. The People's Cube has been removed from google's cache, completely. See their post here.

They have a number of ideas as to why. But have not gotten a response from google with their reasons.

So now my trust in you google is gone. I once relied on your lovely searches, enjoyed your clever graphics and funny responses to the ocasional query. But if I can't rely on you to present an unbiased uncensored view of the internet, then I'm just going to have to cheat on you. That's right, you betrayed my trust, and now I'm going to betray yours, I'll be with Jeeves if you feel like apologizing!

Update: Brendan Nyhan, also Missing from Google- I yahooed it and found This bboard post with a possible explaination from Wail:

This is a known phenomena right now. Sites are blipping in and out ofGoogle's index. If you know you've kept your nose clean and haven't beenspamming then I would sit tight.You do show the symptoms of this; no 'site:'search information but a 'cache:' result. There have been seo forums and seocompanies effected by this and therefore drama. I would wait a week and see whathappens. I certainly wouldn't panic yet.

Commentor DeanT at Nyhan's blog said:

The Peoples Cube web site recently complained of a similar problem.In theircase the issue was hidden spam text. Not spam that a user would notice, but spamthat would normally fool the google robot into giving the site more links thanthe visible text justified. (see the link below fordetails)http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-check-your-own-site/

So maybe it is their own fault after all. Oh sweet google, I am so happy to have evidence of your nonevilitude, but our relationship will just never be the same.